devspace-plugin-loft VS tilt

I'm biased but I do think what you're describing is a good use case for Kubernetes. I work for Loft Labs, we're the company that created vcluster. We do have a commercial product called Loft that lets you manage vclusters and offer them self-service to developers. If you want to get more info on that, the web site is loft.sh.

There are some products available, for example Loft who open sourced vcluster

We run on EKS and use https://loft.sh/ to deploy development environments. The engineer runs the single service locally that they want to modify. Any other services or databases that service connects to run remotely in our Development EKS cluster using Loft and port forwards to the engineers local environment.

Lastly, one day my employer will let my run Loft so that I can provide on-demand ephemeral k8s clusters to my dev + test teams.

Have a look at https://github.com/loft-sh/kiosk and maybe the paid version https://loft.sh/

How many friends? I would recommend evaluating Loft which is free for up to 3 users.

Automate the setup of new k8s environments, ideally they should be ephemeral, disposed regularly and rebuilt by the devs themselves, on demand. This will also keep costs in check, devs don't work 24/7 so why should their cloud infrastructure? A tool worth checking would be Loft

Loft solves this + much more. There are cost-saving features too, so it might actually pay for itself. Don't hesitate to book a demo.

Loft.sh provides self-serve Kubernetes solutions for cost optimization, CI/CD, policy enforcement, user management, collaboration, and more. It helps save on Kubernetes costs by using quotas and space constraints which helps while sharing your clusters among multiple users and teams. Auto delete for idle namespaces and sleep mode for idle workloads also saves costs.

Could improve that crappy feedback loop :)

If the language runtimes are compiled you can't do this, but if not, in theory you shouldn't need such a stupidly long core development feedback loop.

I'm a huge fan of https://tilt.dev/ and the possibilities it unlocks for that pre-commit development.

Something like https://tilt.dev/ where you spin up a subset of the service graph in a cloud environment that hot-reloads based on local edits.

To get a similar experience of preevy up, first we’ll need to split the build and deploy using process or alternatively employ tools that orchestrate build-tag-push-update-sync flow like Skaffold/Tilt.

It's not a direct competitor, but we use https://tilt.dev/ at my company for local and remote development.

For local testing you use tilt that runs stateful services locally in a kind k8s cluster. That same config can deploy to a remote k8s server to easily share a preview of new features, which is useful for prototyping things that might not necessarily ever be merged.

There are dedicated tools just for that. Apart from skaffold check also tilt.dev, garden.io, devspace.sh, okteto.com

You basically start by downloading kind, then tilt. Then create a kind cluster with the provided configuration in the tilt repo. Then run tilt up and that's it. You'll have a fully functional Kubernetes cluster and project running complete with deployments and services. Nothing too fancy, no RBAC, no network policies etc.. Just the bare minimum to get you up and running.

I recommend also looking into tilt.

Second, and perhaps the best of all is, that I created a tilt repository located here.

But apart from the other "k8s in a box" options (like minikube, k0s, ...) you could also have a look at tilt (https://tilt.dev/), it sounds like this might be a good fit for your use case as well.